Pro Cycling Interview

A Veteran's Return

A conversation with Chris Horner about his comeback to racing in March 2012.

daniel mcmahon

Bicycling: You were out of racing for eight months, but you were eventually able to resume training after your accident in last year’s Tour de France. At what point were you back on the bike doing full-on training?

Horner: About five weeks after July. I think it was the 31st when I went into the hospital for the embolism, and it was five weeks after that when I was able to start training again. So it was more about trying to bring the training up to a really high level, then of course you’ve gotta back off, and bring it up, and back off, and up, and back off. You gotta play with it a bit. You can’t ride two hours a day for eight months, so you still gotta do a few five- and six-hour days here and there to bring the form up. But you gotta rest again because you can’t train hard for six and a half months.

Bicycling: How did the embolism affect you and your training, exactly?

Horner: Well, the embolism is a blot clot, of course, and normally coming from below the waist, so usually it manifests in the leg but it can form in other places too. It’s usually caused by some kind of trauma done to the leg. The blood platelets clog up and then instead of dissolving the way they normally would after the injury starts to heal, these just didn’t dissolve, and traveled up the leg into the lung. And then it blocks the lung so you can’t get fresh blood going into it.

The blood going in will collapse the lung, and once it stops the blood from going into the lung itself, it starts to die because it doesn’t have fresh blood. It’s a painful process, and one you want to be very close to the hospital for if it happens to you.

Bicycling: How confident were you going into Tirreno that you were back up to speed, as it were, that you could put this maybe not completely behind you but that you were healthy and fit enough?

Horner: That’s the beautiful thing about the SRM (power meter). You can be very confident. You don’t actually need the racing to make you confident. Without the SRM it’s a little more difficult to judge how you’re feeling, but with the SRM you’re just watching the numbers and you know they’re off the charts. The numbers in training still translate to the numbers in racing, so you know what your fitness is. It’s pretty accurate.

Of course, you don’t know if you’re going to hold the jersey or if you’re going to be top 10; I mean, it’s not that accurate. Or like, “Wow, you can win this race with these numbers.” But it’s accurate enough to tell you that you can go to the race and you’re gonna be a player.

Bicycling: I have to ask—are you better with the technology now? Last time we met, at the Tour of California, your girlfriend—now your wife—told us you didn’t quite know how to download the SRM files and that she did it for you.

Horner: [Laughs] Yeah, well, she still does that! But I know what it’s telling me when I’m looking at it on the bike—I mean, 400 or 500 watts is 400 or 500 watts. OK, if you’re training well you’re training well. But the SRM can really make it a lot more focused in your training when you know those numbers are competitive. If those numbers are competitive, you look at everything else, like making sure I’m not showing up at the race five pounds overweight, which is easy to do.

Horner: Exactly! You can put on five pounds in very short time. For me, the biggest thing is, when I’m coming into the race, I know I’m competitive before I leave for it. And so of course still in the back of my mind I think, “Will the lung hold up for six hours?”

Sure, I’m competitive when I go out on a training ride, where you ride steady all day and do one test up a mountain and see the numbers, but when I go to a bike race at the level of Tirreno-Adriatico, are you competitive when you gotta go up 10 climbs with the best riders in the world, instead of just two or three that you might do in training? That’s what changes from training to the races.

Bicycling: Is there one key number that you look at on your power meter?

Horner: There is a number, and there is a climb near my house. If I’m pulling over 400 watts up that climb I know that I’m going to be competitive when I leave.

Bicycling: How long is that climb?

Horner: It’s like seven to 10 minutes.

Bicycling: So it’s about sustained power then.

Horner: Yeah, sustained power. I don’t have big power. I’m 145, 140 pounds depending on what time of year—maybe even 138. So I don’t have huge power. All mine is sustained power-to-weight ratio. I don’t do what the sprinters do. Those guys have huge power.

Bicycling: So it’s all relative.

Horner: Yeah, it’s all relative to what you need. For my weight and my size, I know when I go up the last climb, I’d better be capable of 400 watts. If not, I’d better stay home and train some more. [Laughs]

Bicycling: So if back in the day you didn’t have a power meter and you just went by heart rate, you wouldn’t really have had that confidence, would you?

Horner: I didn’t even go by heart rate; I just went by feel. And so you wouldn’t have that confidence. You kinda knew but weren’t 100 percent sure. When I left this time for Tirreno-Adriatico, I emailed Dirk Dimol (RadioShack’s sports director) and said “Hey, Dirk. My form’s really good. I’m coming in very, very good form. So be ready.” [Laughs] But it’s the SRM that allows me to send an email like that. It’s my feelings when I’m looking at those numbers and am capable to do those numbers at the end of my training ride.

Bicycling: How does it work with the team if you say, “Hey, I’m coming in with great fitness and I think I can win”? Do they take that and build a team around you?

Horner: Well, there were three different teams going on that week actually. The two major teams were Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico. And Tirreno was set up for the Classics guys getting ready for Milan–San Remo. But those Classics guys are also the guys who can do the team time trial very well because of their power. Dirk showed me the profile of the race and I said, “Hell yeah! I want to do it.” He said, “Great, because we need a GC (general classification) guy.” So the directors talked about it and arranged for me to go to Tirreno and then the other guys for GC at Paris-Nice.